Time and the brain

Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker profiles David Eagleman, a brilliant researcher who’s studying the brain, consciousness, and the perception of time. At a personal level I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years studying and trying to comprehend my own degrees and levels of consciousness and perception. We think of our “conscious experience” as a constant, and our unconscious as inaccessible… but through attention we learn that there are gradations in the range of conscious to “un-” or “sub-” conscious experience; that perceptions can vary with context; that memory is selective and undependable; that our perception of the world is generally incomplete though we do a good job of filling the gaps. When David Eagleman was a child he fell from a roof and realized that his perception of time had changed as he was falling. Now he’s doing evidence-based research to determine how people experience the world, what are the variations, how does the brain work and how does the mind work?  Read about it here. If you know about similar studies and writings, please post in comments.

Connectivism

Have you ever thought about how completely irrelevant structured learning is? Indeed. “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot unlearn and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler. The video below advocates a change in how we learn – network-centric, personal, based on your context, not based on some institution’s agenda. (Thanks to Judi Clark for sending me the link to this video.)

Transitional Internet

I continue to be focused on the future of the Internet and aware of divergent paths. In the later 2000s, following a period of digital and media convergence and given broad adoption of evolving high speed (broadband) network connectivity, the Internet has become an environment for mixed media and marketing. The Internet is increasingly centralized as a platform that serves a global business engine. It’s a mashup of business to business services and business to consumer connections, a mashup of all the forms of audio, text, and video communication and media in a new, more social/participatory context: the faceless consumer now has an avatar, an email address, and a feedback loop.

The sense of the Internet as a decentralized free and open space has changed, but there are still many advocates and strong arguments for approaches that are bottom-up, network-centric, free as in freedom (and sometimes as in beer), open, collaborative, decentralized. It’s tempting to see top-down corporate approaches vs bottom-up “free culture” approaches as mutually exclusive, but I think they can and will coexist. Rather than make value judgements about the different approaches, I want to support education and thinking about ethics, something I should discuss later.

Right now I want to point to a collaboration forming around the work of Venessa Miemis, who’s been curating trends, models, and projects associated with the decentralized Internet model. Venessa and her colleagues (including myself) have been discussing how to build a decentralized network that is broadly and cheaply accessible and that is more of a cooperative, serving the public interest rather than a narrower set of economic interests.

I’ll be focusing on these sorts of projects here and in my talks on the future of the Internet. Meanwhile, here are pointers to a couple of Venessa’s posts that are good overviews for what I’m talking about. I appreciate her clarity and focus.

There’s also the work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, which I’ve followed for several years. The P2P Wiki has relevant pages:

The future of global online journalism

(Update: Alfred Hermida blogs Vivian Schiller’s 7 reasons to be cheerful about journalism at Reportr.net.)

The evolution of networked global communication infrastructures is disrupting and changing delivery of news and the way journalists work. While some publishers have been wringing hands and tearing hair over the collapse of the business model for news publishing, others in the industry get that news, and news authority, will always be relevant, that there will always be a need and a market for informed delivery of and interpretation of facts. I just spent two days (Friday and Saturday, April 1st and 2nd) at the University of Texas’ 12th Annual Global Symposium on Online Journalism, organized by brilliant, forward-looking Professor Rosental Alves. After stewing in the juices of the future of journalism for two days, I’d like to summarize what I think I was hearing.

The future of journalism and the future of Internet are intimately related. The Internet has catalyzed a democratization of knowledge, and is (in my opinion) a force beyond our control, though there are enough discussions about controlling it in some way that I’m seeing discussions of substance about how to resist that control (which are interesting, but out of scope for this post). The democratization of knowledge and the evolution of social tools on the Internet are the two aspects of intense interest on my part that have led me to seemingly diverse projects and discussions involving futurism, politics, evolving markets, participatory medicine, and online journalism. While to some I may seem all over the map, I see a consistency in all of these: they’re all part of an Internet-driven evolution. Politics, marketing, healthcare, and journalism are all experiencing disruption and difficulty as the global online information infrastructure becomes increasingly pervasive and sophisticated.

(Notes:

1. This might be a good place to quote P.D. Ouspensky: “In order to understand a thing, you must see it s connection with some bigger subject, or bigger whole, and the possible consequences of this connection. Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem.”

2. I don’t see “democratization of knowledge” as an inherently wonderful thing. While I’m dedicated to open and distributed knowledge systems, I recognize the relevant issues: “a little knowledge can be dangerous,” “in the wrong hands, knowledge can be dangerous,” etc. I’m also committed to participatory or democratic systems, but with the understanding that they have significant issues – democracy doesn’t scale well, doesn’t necessarily result in the best actions or decisions for all, can be little better than “mob rule,” etc. We have to be thoughtful about these things, and attend to the down sides.)

Internet forces have undermined business models for publishing and news delivery – enough’s been said about that. The UT conference I attended looks beyond that disruption and focuses on the new reality of technology-mediated news dissemination and a new more symmetrical relationship of news organization with news reader. Readers have similar access to the means of production as news organizations, and have the expectation of an environment where they can readily provide feedback on news, if not participate in gathering and disseminationg news stories. Bloggers and small independents are breaking stories and conducting deep investigation. Journalism is becoming a partnership of the news professionals with their more or less informed audiences.

Here are some thoughts and questions I’m having, inspired by the conference (and to some extent by the Future of Journalism track at SXSW Interactive that I helped curate).

  • Today’s newsroom is a high technology operation. The new journalist understands code, and there’s a new breed of developer (in the hacks hackers, program or be programmed mode) who understands journalism well enough to be an effective partner in application development. In this context, there’s an evolution from “shovelware” to apps that effectively leverage diverse platforms, especially mobile platforms.
  • Will the web and the browser continue to be primary platform for news delivery, or will mobile apps be more prominent and effective? Or (more likely) are we looking at an ecosystem where both will be adopted and used? The web has advantages, including ubiquity, existing infrastructure, linkability, bookmarking and social tech.
  • How important are aggregation and curation vs reporting? Are aggregators practicing journalism, or “making sense of the Internet.”
  • Many publications are integrating social media, becoming more conversational. How well can conversations scale? Does this have a democratizing effect?
  • Revolution in Egypt wasn’t driven by social media alone, but also (if not more so) by Egypt’s independent press.
  • How polarized are we, how do we become less polarized, what is the relationship of news to politicization and polarization, and is there a relationship between polarization and credibility?
  • What is the impact of moving from a workflow heavily based on editing to real-time publishing models?
  • What’s the relationship of news to engagement? How can you both engage and scale?
  • New concept: “newsfulness,” or likelihood of a device to be used for news access.
  • Is public journalism a public good? Does it make more sense for investigative news organizations to be nonprofit rather than for-profit?
  • How do news organizations use, and monetize, Twitter?
  • “Gatejumping” vs gatekeeping. Twitter allows early gatekeepers to jump the gates, deliver news directly and immediately.
  • Do online journalists have more autonomy than their offline counterparts?
  • Open APIs catalyze developer communities, potentially bring new revenue potential, speed up internal and external product development.
  • How do news organizations keep up with increasing R&D demands with decreasing budgets?
  • What is the impact of pay walls, and how well will they succeed? What makes paywalls viable: scale still matters, but brand is back. Users are depending more on brand authority, advertisers are getting back to basics.

Link to my tweets from the conference.

Autonomous Smartbird

Festo has created this amazing robotic SmartBird.

Unlike many of Festo’s flying robots, SmartBird doesn’t appear to rely on lifting gas at all. It weighs less than half a kilo, and is capable of autonomous take-off, flight, and landing using just its two meter-long wings. SmartBird is modeled very closely on the herring gull, and controls itself the same way birds do, by twisting its body, wings, and tail. For example, if you look closely in the video, you can see SmartBird turning its head to steer.

Infinite Games

Via Flemming Funch, a review of “Finite and Infinite Games – A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” by James P. Carse: “A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game….An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.”

All finite games have rules. If you follow the rules you are playing the game. If you don’t follow the rules you aren’t playing. If you move the pieces in different ways in chess, you are no longer playing chess.

Infinite players play with rules and boundaries. They include them as part of their playing. They aren’t taking them serious, and they can never be trapped by them, because they use rules and boundaries to play with.

Supermoon

Tonight we’ll have a super perigee moon, “a full moon of rare size and beauty.”

“The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. That is when illusion mixes with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects. On March 19th, why not let the ‘Moon illusion’ amplify a full Moon that’s extra-big to begin with? The swollen orb rising in the east at sunset may seem so nearby, you can almost reach out and touch it.”

[Link]

SXSW 2011

Jeff Lofton playing with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band
Jeff Lofton playing with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band

Intense week at SXSW, starting with the Ed Ward/Jon Lebkowsky breakfast Saturday morning, followed by a Project VRM workshop organized with Doc Searls that afternoon, and much running around Austin that night. Sunday, a core conversation I attended discussed iPad apps for journalism, a good lead-in to the panel I moderated Monday about news apps (standalone apps vs thin client or browser-based data apps). Spent most of Monday revving up the Plutopia event Monday night, which was a smashing success, and included a press conference with Text of Light, David Merrill of Sifteo and Bruce Sterling, where we discussed the meaning of the event’s theme, “the future of play.”

It was like we were thrashing around in our ideas. Some of them might be revolutionary, though none were especially new. For example, I found myself in several discussions about political and governance subjects that felt new when I wrote about them in the mid to late 1990s… they’re still presented as new thinking today in the wake of seemingly effective Middle East protests. But the jury’s still out on those, and governing a protest demonstration, however large and long term and however successful, is not the same flavor as governing a country and plugging it into a new global reality.

I walked into SXSW with a sense that the world is profoundly changing, with the change driven by forces, not by people. It felt like I was in a bubble where time and the world had frozen, a world with its own laws driven by old-school capitalism and marketing. A very pleasant world where so many hoping to attract my attention and allegiance would buy me drinks and feed me really-okay conference food. Last night Asleep at the Wheel was closing down the trade show and I saw a line of people waiting for slices of an enormous cake shaped like Texas. Texas itself is not much of a cake; a state which, like so many other political entities, is overextended and starving for cash. No icing on that cake; very little flour and egg. Mostly a need that politicians were loathe to acknowledge pre-election. Now they’re scrambling to shut down schools and end essential services. No cake there – Texas will be an economic disaster in a decade, because without great schools and a commitment to education, we won’t compete well within the global capitalist economy, if indeed there is one. Things are tough all over; toughest today in Japan, devastated by earthquake and facing potential nuclear meltdown. I heard yesterday that the Japanese at SXSW are stranded here for now, they can’t go back.

The Middle East is exploding with supposed democratic fervor; the energy of democratic revolt is compelling, but there are hard questions ahead, even in if “the people” win. Governance is hard. Democracy is difficult. It’s arguable whether a revolution fixes more than it breaks. You just can’t tell at this stage of the process. The Middle East could be an unstable, unworkable mess for decades in the wake of widespread democratic revolts – this is why the U.S. has tolerated and often propped up dictators there and elsewhere to serve our interest in stability. As a matter of policy, we’ve wanted global stability and sources of cheap labor. The implications of a global middle class are difficult for those who have real power. Those with whole pies socked away aren’t comfortable with the idea of a world where slices of pie will be evenly distributed. Even now they’re driving the dismantling of the American Middle Class, with the full cooperation of ignorant Tea Party zealots who are ready and able to work against their own interests, thinking it’s patriotic to deprive ordinary citizens of education and basic services so that millionaires can become billionaires and billionaires can become trillionaires. We’ve had one of the worst recessions ever and we’re sliding backward, throwing power back to oligarchy even as we rant about the democratization “possible with these great information tools at our disposal.”

That sounds bleak, but I’m still a bit hopeful because so many that I met and spoke with at SXSW seemed smart, sparkly with energy, good-humored and (aside from the Robert Scobles and Tim O’Reillys in the crowd) showing a certain humility, a modesty about their lives and their accomplishments.

And there’s still hot jazz and jammin’ rock and roll in the streets; for that I’m thankful.

Bruce Sterling’s talk via live tweet

Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011
Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011

I live-tweeted Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW Interactive. Here are the tweets… in reverse chronological order, so read ’em backwards.

  • “Women of Italy, cast away all the cowards from your embraces.” SXSW looks like a new world because it’s got women in it.
  • Closing with a Garibaldi quote. “I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death.” And people went for that.
  • This is an era of organized deception! Days of rage, baby. Be realistic, demand the impossible.
  • “Move to Austin, take over the town!”
  • You need to take power, millenials. I’ll vote for ya! You need a global youth movement.
  • Boomers, shut up! What you should study now is collaborative consumption, technomadism.
  • Young people are the victims of a decaying status qo.
  • They pretend to govern, we pretend to obey.
  • Who would save us from the BP? We’re incapable of rapid deciseve action, and the world demands that sometimes.
  • What worries me is the response to things that take courage and virtuosity and passion to work out, like disaster response.
  • Obese people in the US: “Imagine if the Statue of Liberty looked like that.” It brings out one’s inner Bill Hicks.
  • Catholic Church borgia-like devil’s bargain with Berlusconi to get the legislation they want.
  • Republicans: “a joke to anyone outside the range of Fox News.”
  • People don’t want to throw Berlusconi out, because they fear some kind of economic upheaval.
  • Talking about Berlusconi – he’s a head of state behaving like Hugh Hefner. This is a big deal in Italy.
  • ExxonMobil are not the only political malefactors, they’re just the best connected.
  • ExxonMobil is the personification of corporate evil. (applause)
  • You cn do whatever you want to a microbe and no hippie will show up with a protest sign. Microbes are not in the Bible.
  • Beautiful social network for synthetic biology: http://bit.ly/ei4Wja (expand)
  • Craig Ventner was at SXSW because he’s trying to reframe 20c genetic engineeering as 21stc synthetic biology.
  • In our society, we don’t have any passionate virtuosity.Our political situation is the opposite,disgusted incompetence.
  • We’ve got a series of problems that are poorly recognized.
  • Passionate virtuosity…. the ideas in Worldchanging 2.0 are passionate but lack virtuosity.
  • Bruce Sterling shows Worldchanging 2.0 (the book) at sxsw.
  • As a design critic, I criticize stuff that doesn’t exist yet.
  • Polarizing brand management. Culture wars. Politics from POV of a design critic.
  • All the political language has been rendered toxic.
  • “There are people here who are younger than the event.”
  • At Southby, science fiction authors talk like they know what’s going on.

4chan and anonymity

Marc Savlov interviewed me for this article in the Austin Chronicle, generally about anonymity on the Internet and specifically about 4chan. I hope I made the point that anonymity is a wicked problem (what is identity, anyway?), and that it’s sometimes a solution (as in police states, viva Tor). Coincidentally I had interviewed the phenomenal Tom Jennings yesterday for Plutopia News Network, and when he saw the Chronicle article, he sent this link to to a paper he’d written about 4chan. “The effect of the code mechanisms chosen by 4chan encloses a robust
and stable culture of a form and shape not possible in more finely
controlled environments, and that code is deceptively simple.” Christopher Poole, aka Moot, creator of 4chan, will deliver a keynote at 2pm Sunday, March 13, at SXSW Interactive.

David Brooks: “Social Animal”

David Brooks’ article “Social Animal,” in the New Yorker, piled on more insights about human essence and consciousness: “Our perceptions…are fantasies we construct that correlate with reality.”

“I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.

“And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

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